One fable and three quotations that define Humanism to me

1 - ‘We don’t need to attribute the fall of a sparrow to the intervention of Zeus.’

That was the light-hearted sentence the daredevils of Ionia used to
demolish the dungeons of poetic superstition where men and women
lived since the beginning of time.

2 - And Aesop corroborated this sentiment in one of his fables
‘A wealthy Athenian, he wrote, was making a sea voyage with some
companions when a terrible storm blew up and their ship capsized. All
the other passengers started swimming but the Athenian kept praying
to Pallas Athena, making all kinds of promises if only she would save
him. Then one of the other shipwrecked passengers swam past him
and shouted,
‘While you pray to Athena, start moving your arms!’
That was the first call in history for mortals to take charge of their lives.

3 - A couple of centuries later the Sophist Protagoras (490-420 BCE) declared that:

‘Man is the measure of everything.’

4 - Many centuries later Robert G Ingersoll (1833-99) articulated what it means to be a Humanist.
‘When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave.
There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space,
I was free-free to think, to express my thoughts - free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties all my senses, free to spread imagination’s wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.’

Thank you to my benefactors I cited in this short expose.